An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln

220 Pages·2011·1.55 MB·English

by  Robin Blackburn

Marx and Lincoln:
An Unfinished Revolution
Marx and Lincoln:
An Unfinished Revolution
Robin Blackburn
First published by Verso 2011
© the collection Verso 2011
Introduction © Robin Blackburn 2011
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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Contents
Introduction
Abraham Lincoln
First Inaugural Address
Emancipation Proclamation
Gettysburg Address
Second Inaugural Address
Karl Marx
The North American Civil War
The American Question in England
The Civil War in the United States
The American Civil War
A Criticism of American Affairs
Abolitionist Demonstrations in America
Letters
Letter from Marx to Annenkov
Letters between Marx and Engels
Letters between Marx and Lincoln
Articles
Woodhull & Claflin
Independence vs. Dependence! Which?
The Rights of Children
Interview with Karl Marx
Conclusion to Black and White
Thomas Fortune
Preface to the American Edition of The Condition of the Working-Class in
England
Frederick Engels
Speeches at the Founding of the Industrial Workers of the World
Lucy Parsons
Acknowledgments

Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln:
An Unfinished Revolution
In photographs Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln both look the part of the
respectable Victorian gentleman. But they were almost diametrically opposed in
their attitude toward what was called at the time the social question. Lincoln
happily represented railroad corporations as a lawyer. As a politician he was a
champion of free wage labor. Karl Marx, on the other hand, was a declared foe
of capitalism who insisted that wage labor was in fact wage slavery, since the
worker was compelled by economic necessity to sell his defining human
attribute—his labor power—because if he did not, his family would soon face
hunger and homelessness.
Of course Marx’s critique of capitalism did not deny that it had progressive
features, and Lincoln’s championing of the world of business did not extend to
those whose profits stemmed directly from slaveholding. Each man placed a
concept of unrewarded labor at the center of his political philosophy, and both
opposed slavery on the grounds that it was intensively exploitative. Lincoln
believed it to be his duty to defend the Union, which he saw as the momentous
American experiment in representative democracy, by whatever means should
prove necessary. Marx saw the democratic republic as the political form that
would allow the working class to develop its capacity to lead society as a whole.
He regarded US political institutions as a flawed early version of the republican
ideal. With their “corruption” and “humbug,” US political institutions did not
offer a faithful representation of US society. Indeed, too often they supplied a
popular veneer to the rule of the wealthy—with a bonus for slaveholders. But
Marx’s conclusion was that they should become more democratic, broadening
the scope of freedom of association, removing all forms of privilege, and
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extending free public education.
As a young man Marx had seriously considered moving to the United States,
perhaps to Texas. He went so far as to write to the mayor of Trier, the town
where he had been born, to request an Auswanderungschein, or emigration
certificate. In the following year he wrote an article considering the ideas of the
“American National Reformers,” whose comparatively modest original aims—
the distribution of 160 acres of public land to anyone willing to cultivate it—he
recognized as justified and promising: “We know that this movement strives for
a result that, to be sure, would further the industrialism of modern bourgeois
society, but that … as an attack on land ownership … especially under the
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existing conditions … must drive it towards communism.” (The idea of
distributing public land in this way did indeed have explosive implications, as
we will see, and the new smallholders did often lack the resources needed to
flourish, as Marx predicted, but his idea that they would therefore embrace
“communism” was more than a stretch.) In 1849, writing as editor of Germany’s
leading revolutionary democratic journal, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx
praised the frugal budget and republican institutions of the United States in
comparison with the bloated bureaucracy and unaccountability of the Prussian
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monarchy.
Subsequently Marx remained fascinated by events in the US, and for ten years
—1852 to 1861—he became the London correspondent of one of its leading
newspapers, the New York Daily Tribune. The invitation to write for the Tribune
came from Charles Dana, its editor, who had met Marx in Cologne in 1848 when
Marx was in charge of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Marx accepted Dana’s
invitation, and for a decade this was his only paid employment. He contributed
over 400 articles, 84 of which were published without a byline, as editorials.
Although initially happy with the arrangement, Marx complained of the pay ($5
an article, later raised to $10), of the fact that he was not paid for pieces that
were not published, and of the editorial mangling of what he had written. In one
moment of particular vexation—he had received no fees for months—he
confided to his friend Frederick Engels that the whole arrangement was one of
pure exploitation:
It is truly nauseating that one should be condemned to count it a blessing when taken aboard a
blotting paper vendor such as this. To crush up bones, grind them and make them into a soup like
[that given] to paupers in a workhouse—that is the political work to which one is constrained in
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such large measure in a concern like this …
On other occasions Marx expressed himself as pleased to find an outlet for his
views and the results of his research into British social conditions. He wrote